Copley High School: Students tell us how AI is helping and hurting

I think you’re going to have to accept it eventually that AI is staying around. So don’t say just write a paper. Maybe encourage students to actually use critical thinking in the classroom, not just in assignments.

Figure out ways to teach those things that they’re trying to replace with AI like just by asking. If you think that your kids are not using AI, they are. Every one of them is using AI.

So definitely you’re going to have to get on top of it and accept it. But also I would say focus on the skills that you’re trying to teach them rather than like the paper itself. The paper isn’t the point.

The point is that they develop skills for writing. And then find a way to focus on the skills rather than the products or the grades. Because a lot of the reason why kids use AI is because they know they’d get a better grade if they used it than if they didn’t.

And so they don’t develop those skills, but they’re still rewarded by the system. Hi, I’m Alex. This is aiEDU Studios, Alex’s childhood home edition.

I’m here with Anna and Charlotte from Copia High School, two juniors who recently competed in Ohio State finals for public forum debate. I was in speech and debate myself. I also did public forum.

But the reason we’re having you on the show specifically is because the the topic for states was about artificial intelligence and education. Do you remember the exact resolution by chance? Because I don’t.

In the United States, the the harms of generative AI in education outweigh the benefits. Something like that. The benefits outweigh the harms, I think.

Yeah. Okay. So, in short, is generative AI good or bad for education?

Yeah. Out of curiosity, when you when you first encounter when you first read that resolution, like did you have any hot takes? Was this something you even considered before?

I mean, like me personally, I haven’t I at the time I didn’t use much of chat GBT or whatever to like I don’t know, cheat on things or like just in general help with my papers. But I did think kind of going into the beginning that like cheating was always like a thing that cuz that’s what you first think about like generative ad education, people using chat GPC to write essays, but like I always felt like people were going to cheat anyway. That was kind of yeah I the only experience that I’ve had with AI I don’t think I actually ever used it until that point was just knowing about chat GBT and other generative AI models that people would use for homework but that was it.

So that was the first thing that came to mind obviously but I didn’t have any other ideas. Yes. As as with most it’s like cheating like that’s that’s where that’s where your head went.

Tell us about just like what it what it’s like. So you go in, where was the where were states hosted? Austin Town, Ohio, which is very much not central, but it was nice high school.

But we had six preliminary rounds, five on one Friday night, one on Saturday morning, and then after that, they would go into break rounds, a racket style tournament to, you know, weed people off. Yeah. So we actually had an extra round because we were like one of the lower seeds to begin with.

And then after that like runoff round it was I think the top 16. 16. Yeah.

So how many times did you debate it total that day? Six prelim. I think it was nine rounds.

Yeah. Wow. It was awful.

And a round is about 45 minutes. So it was quite a long day. And just to paint the picture for because most most of our viewers and listeners probably have are not familiar with public forum debate.

Yeah. What What is the setup? So, it’s a twoon- two style debate where you go into essentially like a middle school or high school classroom.

It’s you two, your your partner and your opponents with typically one judge and you debate about real world like policy, international politic ideas. You have a pre-written case on both sides typically and you will use evidence, go back and forth, debate until eventually the judge decides a winner. Yeah, the judges are usually just parents of editors and then Anna’s my partner for PF like yeah we have a pre-written case and then there’s like one person that’s first speaker they give the case and then you have your person that does rebuttal which is Anna and you kind of like everything apart from the case that you give just to begin with is like impromptu off the cuff you you can have like pre-written ideas.

Yeah. And we have our like Chromebooks and computers with us to look up evidence, look up new Well, that’s new. We didn’t have computers.

Yeah. We just have like stacks of paper. And you would and you would sometimes when if the opponent were making a really good point, you would like sort of furiously start writing as if it was like, oh, this there’s obviously some rebuttal to this.

It was a lot of like performance performance art mixed in. I think the performance aspect is more so just when you’re actually giving your giving your speech because there’s a lot of people that use like all sorts of jargon and weird terms or they read really really fast for no reason. But I think a lot of the times that actually throws off the judges because they’re just random parents.

So, and that’s what makes it a bit unique is you’re generally debating in front of someone who doesn’t know much about the topic. They’re not experts. They’re sort of lay they’re lay judges.

Yeah. So sometimes jargon doesn’t always win the day. You actually are and even sometimes facts don’t necessarily win the day.

Sometimes you’re making emotional arguments and you sort of have to read the room. It’s definitely a mix. And the idea of public forum is that like anybody can judge and you don’t have to be qualified or know anything about the topic.

So it’s it’s like 50% argument but then also 50% how you present yourself. Oh, and then the other important detail is you have to argue both sides. And is it like actually 50/50?

Do you flip a coin? I forget how how do you how do you decide who which which side you’re Whoever gets to the room first gets to call a coin toss. Whoever wins the coin toss gets to choose whether they go first or second or pro versus con on the argument.

So typically you can have some leeway in which side you goes to toward the when we once further we got into the tournament I think we were choosing more neg con. No no no we went we went pro. We were saying that AI and education is good, but that’s not necessarily reflective of our own opinions.

Just like our case was stronger. Okay. So, if you won the coin toss, you would rather you would choose pro as opposed to go choosing whether to go first or second.

You felt good enough about the pro case. And then when you when you started doing your research, did you have like a sense of which side you’d want to I mean, like which was stronger? Initially after our sort of brainstorming session, it felt like con was going to be way easier to argue and write just because there there were a lot of really strong unique arguments to that.

But eventually I think as Charlotte was writing pro Yeah. So what we do a lot of the time is we because usually there’s like one side of the argument that’s going to be easier and so we research that we write the case but then we lean really hard into the opposite side because we figure that less people are going to be expecting us to argue that side and also because I like overcompensate for the harder side and then we end up going with that side. Kind of right out of the gate you assumed that that pro was going to be harder to argue and so you leaned into it.

So what was the pro side for our case? We said that AI and education was good because of the possibilities of innovation in the medical sector. So we had one contention on like disease diagnosis where different AI models created by universities.

So it kind of fits into education that way are really good like better than professionals at diagnosing certain cancers like lung cancer and pancreatic cancer which are pretty hard to screen for. And then our second contention was creating new cures or reassigning drugs to different diseases. A lot of times there’s not a lot of incentive to research cures for very rare diseases because there’s not a lot of profit and not a lot of people have them.

So they’ll plug in like all sorts of diseases and then all sorts of drugs into like an algorithm and then AI will pick drugs that could possibly treat this disease. And a lot of times it works and like this is all being done by a lot of professors and medical students just like in their college education or in graduate school which is sort of how we connected it to education in that regard. It’s it’s like cuz when you’re trying to make a argument that a lot of people don’t expect, you sometimes got to stretch the definitions out.

So yeah. And the definition I mean in education is broad enough. It didn’t it was it wasn’t specifically K-12 or did you have any opponents who were like ah that’s sort of not gerine.

I mean medicine people people tried but I think when you have a bunch of parent judges and you’re they’re trying to argue that like university research isn’t education but they don’t have a definition of education and we do then it’s not not the best. You know it looks like you just don’t have a response for what we’re bringing up. Right.

If you’re going to argue on s on semantics you have to have a really really strong case or else it just looks like you don’t have a response from the pro side. Did you try had you tried others or did you just kind of right out of the gate you were like that’s going to be our strategy? I think this was more like a right out of the gate sort of thing because I was doing some research into it and the more research I did the more I realized how not prevalent these are but how like they have a really strong possibility to produce a lot of pos or positive change and they’re being implemented now currently and all of the models that I had researched had some connection to a university and I didn’t think that anybody else was going to do it and nobody else did like this was only us that went for the medical sector And like the reason why it was so beneficial is because in public forum a lot of like deciding who wins is based on like weighing impact.

So like giving numbers and a lot of things in education you can’t really like say like this many people will be educated by AI this many teachers will be fired or whatever. So you have we can use lives we can use like actual numbers of years being saved and by people lives being saved which is a lot more impactful when compared to a lot of a lot of other things. So so tell me about the con your your con case.

Our con case we didn’t use very much just because people were calling us out for how we use the definition of education and the judges were believing them. And so I think it was a good case, but I just don’t think that it would have won us many rounds if we leaned into it. So what we did was two contentions.

And then the first one was about how AI is being used to cut down the Department of Education with Doge. And then we went into the impacts that would have on disabled kids, especially with the biases that generative AI has against disabled people. And our second contention was talking about how misinformation is education or how how news is education and then misinformation in the news and like the media is being like infinitely more powerful with AI with making deep deep fakes or literally we found something make making entirely fake news websites run entirely by AI and like not this is a harmful to the mass media but also like our children, people in schools and all that stuff.

And your opponents would their response was the media isn’t education or Yeah, they would just try to argue mostly definitions. Mostly they were saying that our department of education case wasn’t good because we weren’t actually educating anyone. It was just the Department of Education, which I mean, if you’re going to argue that the Department of Education isn’t doesn’t fall under education, that’s kind of silly.

But I could see that a lot of judges were believing them just in like the way that they had their facial expressions and everything. And it was just so tiring to be in a definitions debate the entire time rather than actually talking about anything of substance. So, we switched over to pro for most of our most of the rest of the rounds.

And it’s interesting because it also suggests that your opponents really didn’t have a good way of countering it besides the definition. Yeah, it’s definitely something that only we were talking about. Somebody else tried to do misinformation, but they didn’t connect it to education at all.

Yeah, they their attempt at misinformation was like they didn’t really specify. They just said AI is in schools, AI causes misinformation, therefore it’s bad. But they didn’t specify how much of this misinformation is in schools, where it’s in schools.

When I pressed them on it, they only said that misinformation if it is happening in like the news in the general public, then it must also be happening in schools. But that’s kind of I don’t think that’s a very strong point because schools are a lot different than the general public. They’re a lot more secluded and there’s a lot more restrictions on the things that you can see.

So we we push them on that. But I think they could have made a better argument if they had gone with if if education is teaching somebody something than like all news media is education. Yeah.

Because there’s not I don’t know that AI is like causing misinformation in schools, you you you’d have to sort of extend it to like hallucinating and the fact that you know AI tools are sort of inherently can’t fully be controlled. So there I think there’s a way to do it, but yeah, definitely harder than just defining misinformation or defining media as education. Yeah.

So if you mostly were able to go pro, that means your opponents were generally because you’re roughly 50/50, you know, winning or losing the the coin flip. So opponents were gravitating towards con like that’s what they wanted to argue. Yeah.

So So nine rounds total. Nine rounds. You placed fifth.

Fifth. Yep. Which is a big deal.

Like like there’s a lot I mean like how many how many debates I mean you go to every every other month right or every month or every week we go to a tournament every month we change topics it’s there’s and this is in the entire state so like only a select few people were even able to make it to state finals and out of those people we got fifth and as as juniors from like a school that doesn’t actually have a speech and debate class we were pretty proud of ourselves. Yeah, because some schools have a literally class every day. You were going and you’re working on your case.

You have a teacher that’s working with you meeting after school with with Chris Deloer who was it’s interesting. He was like my biggest rival when when I was in public forum debate. I forget what school he was in, but I remember that this it would always you know we would just like inevitably clash and you know I think we we probably went I I’d be curious of his take on this.

I think we probably were 50/50 in terms of you know who would win when we would go up against one another. He probably would not say that. I think I think he would say that he won, but yeah, I don’t have the I don’t have the stats on that.

He always he always had the most like he would always have some like really interesting de like like arguments to pull out of his back pocket. It’s very cool that So he’s he’s your debate coach. And so you placed fifth, which means out of nine rounds, how many did you win?

I think we lost two preliminary rounds. So we just made it to the cutoff, right? Yeah.

And then we lost one. So at the end six out of nine we won. Yeah.

Yeah. So what was the what was the strongest con argument? I think the one that we heard the most, the one that I remember the best was talking about how AI is going to increase like inequality in education or the education gap where lower income students or minority students, people that are on the margins of society are going to be given AI tools and AI teachers and things like that.

And then the actual the the rich kids or maybe the white kids in these nicer schools are going to be given actual hands-on learning with teachers and inerson like inerson resources. And then they would talk about the impacts that AI has on kids, whether that be socially or with the misinformation thing. And then they’d like spin it off to say like we’re we’re we’re hurting the people that are already being hurt the most.

And that’s kind of the way that we counter that was talking about how AI has the possibility to decrease the education gap if used properly. But what they would say in response is that it it becomes like a temporary solution where you can implement an AI robot instead of a teacher. But then if that’s cheaper, it’s going to become permanent.

And that’s not something that we want to see happen for lower income kids. It’s not the right solution. But then some people would actually do the complete opposite of that where they would say that the wealthier school districts or the whiter school districts would get access to AI because they just said AI was more expensive to implement and so then it would further the technology gap where the richer districts are obviously getting all these technologies like what happened with the internet and then the poorer districts are left behind.

So even if AI is ultimately good in education, it’s bad because it’s still widening that gap and it’s still causing a digital divide. Yeah, it’s interesting because we’re, you know, I’ve just attended a bunch of conferences where that’s the discussion. In fact, I think mostly most like right now in education, most folks are really talking about the potential for AI to improve teaching and learning.

But there are folks, you know, myself included, who have just, and I think that is one of the things we talked about, right, is idea that if you can’t just throw lots of AI at education gaps and assume that that’s going to to solve them because there’s like that world where yeah, you have a bunch of kids just sitting in classrooms getting all the AI and it’s like they’re not they’re not getting the the the full dynamic, you know, human centered experience that, you know, wealthier or just more advantage kids get. Just like walk me through like when you encounter that did you just go for the opposite? So if they if they argued AI was you know going to exacerbate you know gaps because it was going to be overused you would argue that it could be better and then the vice versa.

Yeah. So what we did when they brought up like it’s going to worsen the education gap because lower income students are going to get the AI resources. We talked about how if it’s implemented properly, it can actually help teachers to plan lessons or help administrations administrative costs and it’s not going to be replacing teachers as much as it’s going to be eliminating costs in and like time constraints in other areas.

And so it could possibly help this education gap and we had a few cards on that. We just show them that because it’s kind of hard to argue with like an actual piece of evidence. They can argue with our logic, but we had we had a few sources for that.

Yeah. Essentially, we would just ask them, "All right, prove it. Where is this happening?" Like, "How are like are is AI replacing these teachers?

Is this actually happening now or cuz most of the time it was just sort of they were just making a surf like theoretical." Yeah. And then the one team that did the opposite where was like rich kids are going to get AI and everybody else is going to get these lesser resources. I think we argued that I mean this is this is a systemic issue more so than AI’s problem where you haven’t proven that AI is causing any harms.

You’re just proving that people are going to get it in an unequal fashion which is not really resolutional because we’re talking about the causes the harms that AI specifically causes not the not the harms that the unequal education system causes. Oh, I really like that. Yeah, because basically it’s not just AI that’s going to be exacerbating those differences.

It’s also access to transportation and broadband. AI is a symptom of a larger issue, I think, rather than the actual issue. It has the possibility to make that issue worse, but putting it in to certain schools or not in this context is not going to actually fix the thing that is causing this this education inequality.

And like with their argument, they’re sort of implying that AI is making the actual education of those maybe richer districts better. It’s somehow doing good in the school itself, which we felt sort of fell into our argument with furthering that sort of definition Charlotte just gave. So, in the instances where you did lose, do you have a sense of like what drove that?

Like what what was was it just like trouble convincing the judge or I remember one round that we lost. It was one of the earlier ones, a prelim and we went con and I think we lost because our definition of education the judge didn’t like because we were talking about the department of education. The opponents were saying that’s not actually educating somebody and so we just like that took up a lot of the round and I don’t think our judge appreciated that very much and so he voted for our opponents.

During the tournament, do you actually get any of the feedback from the judges or do you have to wait until the end? So, you have no sense of like why you won or lost? You just get the We didn’t get it until after it was already done the next day.

But we sort of I mean, you obviously kind of have some sense of if you like destroyed them or not or like how how good you did, but it a lot of these because it was obviously finals, it was a a coin flip a lot of the time. Yeah. Like it’s it’s it’s a tossup when you get go against like better opponents especially in states but the actual like official feedback is the day after like I don’t know who to blame if you get caught into this definition cuz it’s just up to the judge at that point.

Yeah. So you’re kind of so you’re seeing the judge’s face and it’s and you sort of have to make a just a call. I’m like this this could be going bad for my opponents but it’s also 50/50.

We don’t really have any evidence. We have less control. So, let’s sort of pivot to an area where we have more evidence.

We we make a lot of generalizations based on like the stickers on their computer and stuff. We have to I think that judge in particular was one of the coaches. I think he was a Perry coach or something that clearly knew what he was talking about.

He was very silent trying to keep a mass face. Did you like any weird arguments that just you didn’t expect or like left field in this one team? There was hunting in round six.

I think it was they were arguing. They were on con. We were on pro.

Yes. Yeah. And they were arguing.

I think it stemmed off of chat bots where Yeah. Students are interacting with AI over actual people. This is like declining their mental health.

And ultimately the weird it’s like it sounds like Okay. Do you want me to go through like the actual train they had? It was so stretched.

They said that children are interacting with chat bots and they feel compelled to keep talking to these chat bots and they start to like form a bond with them, but that leads them to get less socialization with actual people which causes them to all become depressed and that will cause them to all commit suicide. And then their ultimate number was like 9 million people and we were like there’s what? But how’s that connected to education?

That’s what we said. But also like their impacts were so stretched. Yeah.

I think I ultimately asked and their reasoning was kids will use ChatGPT to like cheat on homework or whatever and then they’ll keep they’ll see hey ChatGPT is good. They’ll keep going and then eventually it’ll move to their home life and then they feel compelled to keep using it and like form a a social bond with it. So education is almost like the the the vector the transmission vector for this like much bigger harm.

So they’re like education is actually just that’s not really the story. The story is all these kids are going to commit suicide. Yeah.

But but I don’t they didn’t argue it very well and I don’t think that education was like the main focus. What they’re I think what they were going for when they were making this case was how do we get the biggest number possible? And they just kind of found a way to work back from that cuz 9 million kids is half of all American high schoolers, which you know that’s kind of ridiculous.

I think I looked up that card afterward and it said maybe this many people per year have suicidal thoughts. Nothing related to AI or chat bots or Was that even in the US or was it globally? I I don’t remember.

I think it was might have been globally. I don’t know. It was really stretched.

It was And the resolution was in the US. Yeah, specifically. Okay.

I mean, I think the chatbot argument could be really powerful. I think it could have been, but but you you’d still get caught up in the this this definition. Yeah, cuz like like are students talking to their AI boyfriend at school or like there there definitely have been like chat bots that have done bad things.

Like I I was researching the chatbot argument when I was writing my case for Con and there was like apparently this one like character AI of Billy Isish who told the kid to go kill his parents or something like that. And so they sued the company, something of that sort. And so yeah, there’s definitely a problem, but it’s just kind of hard to connect that to education because it seems like something that would be limited in schools like smartphone usage or something, you know, not it doesn’t really have an educational quality.

And so you don’t because I would have I wouldn’t have even tried to connect it to schools specifically. I would just say like the the ways that you you are educated is you’re also educated about how to operate, you know, as a human and in sort of social environments and, you know, part of everybody’s education is stuff that happens outside of school. It’s things like social interactions and friendships and asking someone to prom, but it sounds like that might have actually been a little bit difficult to convince judges of because people were being a little bit more pedantic about this.

Yeah, if you could if you could have like a good definition of education, that could be a strong argument, but just the way that they did it was I don’t think that was the correct way to do it cuz like obviously we talked about oh what’s your first thought is most people think cheating on papers that’s the judge’s first thought too. So the further you get away from that kind of baseline thought of what AI is in education the less convincing your argument is at some point. Any like really effective creative arguments that you didn’t expect?

Trying to remember what the arguments were that we heard. This was a while ago. Yeah, I think I mean the first round was the job gap.

That wasn’t like Yeah, we heard about brain drain a little bit where they said that AI was going to help the brain drain by like educating people in more rural areas and giving them more job opportunities. They didn’t connect it very well to like how many jobs would actually be created. And you could definitely argue that it’s going to take away jobs from people, but there was you can definitely argue that you could Yeah, you could you could I think have like a creative argument for AI if you went in that direction.

I don’t think they did, but And then we also heard one about climate change, which was I think like they might have been on to something. They were talking about how like many carbon emissions GBT3 or something like that emitted and it was a very high number. It is it is a high number.

I mean that’s definitely that’s what there’s there’s no doubt a a huge con argument sort of in terms of is AI good or bad for society. But I’m trying to think about okay so to connect it to education I guess was it just that like climate change is going to be so catastrophic it’s going to be harder to learn if there are floods? No, the problem was they didn’t connect it to education.

The point was that using AI in train, especially training AI models obviously takes up a lot of water a and a lot puts a lot of carbon into the air. And they use GPT3 as an example which kind of wasn’t the best example because it’s specifically we’ve gotten better since then. They essentially said that with that and with students would be using AI every day in schools constantly putting in inputs would eventually output some level of carbon except they couldn’t really specify which sort of is where they lost like you could go in that direction but they didn’t quantify how what like what percentage of this would be a result of education or what the increase in AI usage in education would be.

So you could say like, you know, this many people die of carbon emissions and this many emissions were made by G GBT3, but you can’t actually connect it directly to education because we don’t know what percent of that is caused by education or would be. I mean, I think that I mean, I I think that could have been a powerful argument because there’s actually there’s some there’s some stats that show the usage of chat GBT dropping at least initially. I don’t know if this is still the case in 24.

But in 2023, I think it was like a big drop between like May and June. And then a big increase all of a sudden in like August, September. I don’t know how specific you’d have to be for a judge to feel like you could actually make the connection, but it’s like, you know, like like students make up.

Yeah. Clearly something here. Yeah.

And so nobody made like the existential risk like AI is going to basically just kill us all and putting in education is just going to like you know hasten that. That was that was actually I think the LD topic. It was about whether reducing general AI was moral something like that something with general actually there was one other debater that went to states in LD.

I she’s a senior, but we convinced her to make her argument. AI is going to kill just kill us all. But the twist is that she argued that that was a good thing.

Well, kind of. Mr. Deoia didn’t like that idea very much, but he he like he modified it so it was like, well, we’re going to leave this legacy behind, and if we’re all going to die anyways, then might as well have AI be like the Yeah. What’s left.

So, we should produce it now. I wanted to I I wanted her to argue that it’s moral for all humans to die because she it’s her senior year, last debate ever, you know, but she didn’t want to do that. Wow.

So So the argument went we’re all going to human humanity is doomed one way or another, whether it’s the sun, you know, blowing up or Yeah. Like essentially Fermy’s paradox, the great filter. Yeah.

And so we’d be better off at least having some like legacy that sort of continues forward our ability to have an imprint on the universe and potentially even maybe we’re also uploaded. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s a classic sort of like the difference between LD and public forum. Public forum is very just like stuff that you read in the news. Very Yeah.

Evidence where LD is more philosophical and like oh what if and all that fun stuff. Pre and post going through this. I mean, has your perspective on AI changed?

I didn’t know about the AI in the medical sector before. So, it’s definitely very interesting and I think it could have a lot of positive uses. What I’ve learned, I think most of all, is that when you’re talking about AI, you have to be very specific what AI you’re talking about because AI can like give you your Netflix recommendations or guide missiles for the US Army.

And so people often generalize AI and even within like one group of AI like generative AI which is what we were talking about. You have to be specific where it’s being used and for what purpose. So like I’m against chat GBT being used to write essays.

And I think that’s going to worsen a lot of people’s reading scores and like comprehension and ability to write. And however I think that if we created AI models to maybe find cures for diseases that are not being researched that could really help people. Yeah.

And like one thing I realized just going through the entire tournament is how much just we don’t know what will happen. It’s like we’re at like a crux and like AI could go this way, AI could go that way, it could be used this, but like we have so little evidence, but it could easily go any of those ways. Yeah.

Like researching this, I felt like I realized I am standing on the the like the brink of a technological revolution. Like this is the new internet. This is the new I don’t know what was before that telegraphs.

But like this is yeah this is the the big thing that like we are going to live through and we’ll be telling our kids well when I was a kid AI was just coming out or we didn’t have this we didn’t have that so like like what Anna said you know where are we going to go from now where are we going to go from here because I think a lot of people are not talking about the direction that AI is going just talking about what it’s doing right now yeah if you once you start to zoom out and I think that’s what’s interesting about this resolution is it forced you to actually take this bigger picture getting too caught up in cheating specifically maybe it feels like you know small beans compared to you know the other implications I’m curious as have you changed your your thinking about your career pathways at all I mean I think I was you know before thinking about the medical sector but still I am but like I’m slightly more excited about it now because like obviously you our procase was about innovation in the medical sector in universities and I feel like it might open it just more opportunities especially just like in being able to research in being able to sort of mitigate those minor tests and we can able to we’re able to like focus more on the big picture like as humans. Yeah, I I feel the same way as Anna. Very interested in science and possibly the medical sector and I’m not a very technological person but if this is going to be like just the new Google then it’s something we’re thinking about and you know I wonder like in 10 years what is it going to look like in the medical sector or in the research field you know how are we going to find diseases or even like like put genomes into databases things like that you know how is AI going to factor in Does AI come up?

I mean, when you’re thinking about when you’re going through the process of deciding, I mean, you’re juniors right now and so have you applied to college yet, but remind me when that happens. Is that like the summer you start? Usually like August, September.

But I’ve gone on a bunch of college visits. We actually went on one two days ago. We went down to OSU.

Oh, nice. And I liked it. I thought it was good.

But I think the actual application starts like August through fall next year. How was Kabby High School trying to inform your decisions? I mean, is there a a teacher or like a a counselor that will like come in and sort of talk about here’s how, you know, career paths are are changing?

I mean, is there any conversation about the fact that there are these new technologies and they’re kind of potentially going to change, you know, the the types of degrees or credentials or skills that you might need to be successful. Well, we have like we have counselors, but I think the only thing that they talked about with we also had a career fair a while ago, but I think the only thing that they talked about with AI was when they had you come in and talk about it, which to their credit, they did that, but that was that was really it. You know, most people when they think of AI, it’s still just chat, GBT, and cheating and not how how it’s going to impact the workforce even though people know it is going to.

And I think actually in my financial literacy class, we he talks my teacher talks about yes financial literacy, but also we’re in a unit where we’re talking about college and talking about jobs. So he obviously is talking about choosing your career and how like he mentioned a little bit how AI could change it or how like new technology in general might change it. Especially in the like computer field.

So people aren’t talking about the future of work. Not really. Like like had that phrase actually come out of out of curiosity?

No. People when it comes to AI, they just say it’s going to take away jobs mostly, but they don’t really specify when or like how fast or what jobs. I that’s just the only thing that I’ve heard. It’s going to take away jobs.

And so you have the benefit of having gone through speech and debate and spend a lot spending a lot of time learning about, you know, AI and education. But so it’d be accurate to say like your friends who are also making the same decisions about where to go to school or what to do after they graduate even if it’s not, you know, a four-year degree. Maybe teachers aren’t or counselors are bringing it up like are are kids talking about it?

Is this like something on TikTok? I think in my personal experience, it’s just like I use this AI to do my math homework or write my English essay mostly. That’s that’s really the extent of it.

We actually the closest the only AI mostly I’ve seen actually in class other than what I just mentioned is ironically when we were in our government class and our we were working on a big project and we had to do a bunch of like a list of tasks I was assigned one and I asked my teacher hey can I just use ChatGPT for this and she said yeah I’m technically supposed to encourage you to use AI in like work or like your education so yeah go for it and then I just used ChatGPT to do it. I showed it to her and she’s like, "Wow, that’s pretty good." And then I submitted it. Oh, you know what?

In my art class, actually, my teacher is using Chat GBT to give us feedback on our art. So, she’ll take a picture of our art piece and put it into chat GBT and say, "How can I improve this?" And then it will spit out a bunch of results. Usually, they’re pretty accurate, I would say.

Whoa, that’s actually amazing. I’ve never I’ve never seen that use case using I guess because now it has sort of like the vision capabilities and like actually create art as well. It is really wild to me that there’s there’s not because I guess from the the space that I operate in which is very adjacent, right?

K-12 education, but from the standpoint of, you know, education leaders and all the foundations organizations that are really obsessed with how do we help kids like you and your peers get onto pathways that are successful. In the spaces that I’m in, it is it is like a certainty. They’re like jobs are going to change dramatically.

There’s going to be lots of disruption. AI is going to, you know, create new winners and new losers. And the key thing is that we need to make sure that students have, you know, the skills and knowledge to be able to make good decisions about their career pathways to have this the competencies and knowledge they need to thrive, etc., etc. And even in like the World Economic Forum has, I think it’s called like the future of work commission or some sort of, you know, entity that’s literally talking about the future of work, you know, every single day.

There’s blog posts. There’s I think there’s probably entire blogs just called like the future of work. There seems to be some weird dissonance that we’re not creating that conversation in with the future workers who are and like you’re literally like months away from making decisions about college.

Which I think by the way health sciences medicine good that’s good good pathway to be on maybe not as many doctors that are just doing what doctors today do but as you as you pointed out there just going to be so many interesting ways to actually use AI to sort of enhance and improve health healthcare I mean that and maybe like you know becoming a plumber is probably among the very few like truly you know reliable pathways where we have we know enough to to feel confident I think I think the reason why we’re not talking about it so much in my school is because like boomers were the generation that doesn’t know how to use like a smartphone. And I think maybe our teachers are in the generation that’s going to be like that with AI because it’s just it wasn’t like a part of when they were growing up or when they were young adults. We were the generation with the iPhone in our hand when we were born, but now we’re also going to be the generation that has AI in our workforce.

And because they don’t have it in their workforce, it doesn’t seem as much of an issue to them as it will be to us eventually. Cuz your assumption is that the the students at Catholic High School are probably more experienced with using AI than the teachers. Yeah, actually one once again another example in financial literacy.

He we had like just a little fun thing like come up with the weirdest scholarship you can find. I saw at least 10 people open their phone and open ChatGPT literally just ask the question, scroll down and pick an answer. And did the teacher realize that was happening?

Oh no, he doesn’t care. But, you know, I think a lot of teachers just don’t realize that it’s happening at all. Especially the older ones or people that aren’t like English teachers definitely know what’s what’s going on.

But like, for example, math teachers don’t know that you can take a picture of your homework and probably have Chad GPT solve it, I’m guessing. Yeah, there are AI math that ma math AIs that’ll just literally step by step, here’s how to solve this, and then you just copy it down. Yeah.

You’re sort of in this golden era of like arbitrage like basically this this period where the teachers haven’t really caught up to the capabilities and you know future classes at CPPley will will pine for the days when the teachers were not as caught up in smart I definitely see like the the restrictions on AI are lagging far behind AI’s capabilities and and there’s some people that again that get the you know in our space who are like oh teachers they they just need to get past this idea of AI is cheating. You know, we need to empower students to use AI and harness it. And what I’m hearing from you is like, yeah, but they’re also actually literally just cheating.

Like they’re not they’re not using it to do more creative stuff. They’re just like pulling out their phones, getting like a quick answer. Well, it’s it’s kind of nuanced because like for example, when I was in middle school, Grammarly was the big new thing and everybody was using Grammarly, which is just a spell check.

And now I know a lot of people that just can’t spell because Grammarly was in their life from that young age. And I think a lot of time I think that’s going to be the case for the middle schoolers nowadays when they have chat GBT and they can write their essays. They just won’t be able to write on their own anymore.

And you know kids have always been cheating. So the problem of why they cheat is not different now. But the difference with AI is that it has the capability to not just give you pointers on an essay or you’re not just plagiarizing someone else’s essay.

It writes a completely original essay for you specifically about what you want. You can input anything in there and it will spit it out in a matter of seconds. It’s something that we’ve never seen before.

Yeah. But also going back to the debate, we I during my research on rebuttals against that sort of argument, I actually found something really cool where OpenAI has discovered a way to essentially they put like a tag on like every anything written by ChatGPT and they’ve developed like a an actual like 90ome percent way like certainty way to identify anything that was written by ChatGPT better than what obviously previously was. And California has actually introduced a bill to mandate that they actually put this in their algorithm and to mandate this happens.

So to prevent cheating in schools and to prevent all these negative stuff that we’re talking about. Yeah. Like like watermarks of some kind.

Yeah. It’s really hard in text. I mean with with images it’s much easier.

So you can like sort of like create these sort of image like watermarks for like AI generated images. Yeah. Yeah, that I mean there’s a big there is a a big debate if you will about this.

There’s a challenge with watermarks is you’re you’re kind of relying on the ability of deterrence to always outpace you know people’s ability to sort of just like get around it. And you know I don’t I don’t know if that’s a good bet. I don’t know if it’s a good bet that there will never be, you know, some freely available model that’s able to get around the the the detectors.

And if teachers, instead of trying to figure out how do we how do we rethink the way that we create assignments so that it’s harder for students to just use AI purely as a shortcut, they’re not going to build those skills. I think there’s actually going to be this this class of students in that gray area right where we’re in right now where they’re going to be getting good grades. They’re going to be passing, you know, high school.

They’re going to be passing classes in college and they’re just not going to be like ready. They’re going to they’re going to be, you know, either getting into college and like starting to, you know, at some point you’re you can’t just chat GBT your way through a class. And I’ve actually heard this.

I’ve heard the it was stats or something and it’s like, yeah, everybody keeps failing their stats tests because they we’re using AI and then like eventually you have to do like a right like you know sit a test in class and they’re just bombing it. Yeah, I think that’s kind of scary knowing that like the next generation of architects and nurses and things like that are being are using AI to do their work and then they’re going to go out into the job force because we have don’t have a lot of restrictions on it right now. Yeah.

But at some point you do have to think about it like the way we were talking about earlier like in the debate rounds we used this analogy a lot a lot of AI is just like a tool. It’s like the calculator where you know obviously at first people were saying oh kids are going to lose their math skills whatever they’re not going to know how to do basic multiplication but ultimately it kind of allowed higher level math courses to be much easier because you could just punch in the easy stuff to learn the harder stuff and eventually I think we will have to transition to that point with AI even if we aren’t there right now. Yeah, ultimately there will be a loss of skills that’s inevitable, but it’s it’s more about what are the new things that we can do now that we have this tool in our pockets.

You’re really speaking about this more eloquently than than a lot of the people that are that are self-described experts in AI and education. It’s fascinating because that tension of lots of skills like handwriting, spelling is a great example, handwriting is another example. So there are certain skills that you say well like yes it it is a shame that we don’t sit down and like have perfect penmanship.

I think it was like the amount of pages that a student writes in like high school today is like let’s say five pages of pros per week in terms of like content like like in this case typed like usually today. In the 1980s it was like half a page. And so we’re actually creating more content.

We’re actually getting a chance to write more because of computers and the keyboard. And on balance, it’s probably better to have a chance to write more than to necessarily have good penmanship and spelling doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Writing though, if if we get to a place where it’s like, well, now people just don’t really have the ability to like come up with a thought on their own because like writing is sort of thinking.

Like I be I be I don’t even think I have to ask. My guess is that chat GBT wasn’t actually terribly helpful for for debate. I mean, I don’t know if you use it.

I mean, use it at all to summarize things. No, I think they did officially put out something that’s like, "Please don’t write cases with AI." I’m I asked it to one time, not for this one, for like an older one. I was like, "Can you write a PF case about this topic?" And it was terrible.

So, I went and do it again. I think actually we we were doing our initial brainstorming session for Little’s I think the state qualifying. We asked Grock.

Yeah, we did ask the ex Twitter AI and he actually it wasn’t terrible ideas. They were stuff that we already came up with though. Yeah, my guess is it would probably have created a really coherent case.

But the problem is when you’re competing like just having like something that sounds right isn’t enough. It doesn’t take into account like the the oral component of you know having to do it in this amount of time or it like it can’t actually list sources and link them correctly. So, but there there’s like a lot of people I think that are arguing that AI right now, like especially with art AI or written AI, you can tell it’s AI, but I like there will be a time in the future when you can’t.

So, I it’s just like I know this is kind of unrelated, but I think that’s one of the major arguments that people that are against AI say is like you can tell it’s AI. It’s never going to reach the capabilities that a human has, but it will eventually. It’s just not there right now.

And like I think I just saw online like a few days ago like everyone remembers the Will Smith eating pasta AI made video like literally like less than two years ago and then they compared it to what it is today and it’s like exponentially like if you just sort of glance at it, it looks real but obviously it’s getting better. And then with AI accuracy and hallucinations that’s also getting better. It’s this came up a lot actually in debate of like is AI good at teaching because of how accurate it is and the ultimate response was sure AI will never be truly accurate but neither could humans.

Right. Right. Like teachers make mistakes as well and that’s we don’t consider that a fatal flaw.

Yeah. You’re I mean you’re really you’re you’re you’re really informed about this. I think this is a testament not just to your own brilliance but to to speech and debate and and public forum.

I mean I just feel like I learned it’s it’s sort of like a fire hose for random topics and you just sort of like have to learn how to get really smart on new things in a short amount of time. Do you have any parting advice? I’m not going to say your teachers but for for any educators because a lot of the folks who are watching this are educators.

You know, they might be hearing this and kind of freaking out about like, okay, like maybe I do need to be taking it more seriously that my kids are potentially using this and maybe it’s not just, you know, helping them do more creative work and augmenting their their skills, but actually maybe just getting in the way. Like, what advice do you have for teachers that are trying to just stay on top of this and this being sort of like the use of AI in and out of the classroom in ways that maybe they’re not even necessarily aware of. I think you’re going to have to accept it eventually that AI is staying around.

So figure out ways where AI can’t just be like don’t say just write a paper. Maybe encourage students to actually use critical thinking in the classroom, not just in assignments. Figure out ways to teach those things that they’re trying to replace with AI like just by asking or like have an interactive classroom where it’s once again just not just assignment assignments assignment try to actually teach them.

Yeah, I would say if you think that your kids are not using AI, they are. Every one of them is using AI. So definitely you’re going to have to get on top of it and accept it.

But also, I would say focus on the skills that you’re trying to teach them rather than like the paper itself. The paper isn’t the point. The point is that they develop skills for writing.

And then find a way to focus on the skills rather than the products or the grades. Because a lot of the reason why kids use AI is because they know they’d get a better grade if they used it than if they didn’t. And so, they don’t develop those skills, but they’re still rewarded by the system.

So find a way to have maybe more hands-on activities, more in-classroom activities so that way you can monitor them and maybe more brainstorming sessions. Definitely try to incorporate like critical thinking like what Anna said. Charlotte Anna, this was awesome.

Great advice. And good luck in your college search and in the last what five weeks of your junior year. Something like that.

All right. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having Thank you for inviting us.